This intriguing and intelligent book is a testimony to what a creative and persistent scholar can do with a single word. As Patrick Thomas Hajovsky reveals in the preface to On the Lips of Others, while studying Nahuatl as a graduate student he became fascinated by tenyotl. Literally meaning “lip-ness,” the term is translatable as “fame.” Such a gloss requires an explanation, of course, and this Hajovsky provides over the course of ten chapters.
If that sounds as if the book is a work of philology or linguistics, it is not—or not quite. The linguistic turn in all Mesoamerica’s disciplines has by no means subsided, and it continues to evolve and expand in ways that encourage increasing varieties of methods and foci. Hajovsky, for example, is an art historian, interested equally in text and image. He is able to turn an interest in a single Nahuatl term into...
